It’s OK to say, 'I don’t know'

Is it wrong to pretend to understand something when you clearly don’t?

Many of the graduate students I’ve worked with over the past several years have arrived with significant professional experience in areas where often I have next to none. They signed up for the courses I taught because I happened to teach something in which they had no or limited experience.

Somewhere in the early days of the course, I typically remind the students of the fact that they know more than I do about what they’ve done prior to coming to school. But I go on to tell them that I am sort of like Liam Neeson’s character, Bryan Mills, in the movie "Taken," in that like him I have “a very particular sets of skills” that I have “acquired over a very long career.” The students sometimes will laugh (humor can be hard in any classroom), but they seem to get the point that I am trying to make: I know what I know, and I will not pretend to know things I don’t know.

When I am working with students who want to write articles for a general audience, I remind them that their audiences will often not know as much as they do about what they are writing. They must be able to write in a way to make things understandable enough to make their message clear.

Here, I remind them of a colleague I once hired to work as a content editor at a software startup. She once told me that she had no problem getting information from the software engineers by reminding me (and often them) that if the engineers couldn’t explain something to her, it was likely they didn’t understand it themselves.

Most of us find ourselves in situations from time to time where we simply don’t know something or understand something that someone is trying to tell us. If we don’t know the person well, the temptation might be to feign comprehension rather than to admit we haven’t a clue what they’re talking about. There are any number of reasons for having such a reaction. We might fear being judged as ignorant for not knowing something. Or our insecurities might kick in, making us want to appear more knowledgeable than we are.

There is, however, little upside to pretending to know something we don’t. By failing to acknowledge our ignorance, we risk never understanding whatever it was we pretended to know. We also risk sending a message that we’re capable of doing something when we have yet to understand what that something is. While an instructive YouTube video might help us in some cases to cover should we ever be asked to actually do that something, that’s not a reliable method toward understanding something.

The more honest and useful response is to acknowledge our ignorance. That doesn’t make us lesser or stupid or a failure. It simply acknowledges that we have the integrity to acknowledge when we don’t know stuff and the desire to want to learn more.

Telling someone we don’t know is not only the right thing to do, it gives that person the chance to share knowledge. If they can’t, then it’s likely they too don’t know.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Should we tell friends when we see old social media posts?

If you stumble upon an old social media post made by someone you know and it might prove embarrassing or harmful, should you alert them to your discovery?

Frequently over the past 20 years, when I’ve come across a Facebook post made by someone I know that might wreak havoc on their job search as they are about to enter the market, I’ve let them know.

Perhaps it was a relative who was a rising college senior who once thought it amusing to post a photo of herself chugging back alcohol at a party, but forgot the photo was there or didn’t give it much thought. My email might remind them that potential employers can scour the internet for anything about a prospective employee that might give them pause. Did they really want the chugging photo to be among the first things potential employers found when they did a search?

On other occasions, a friend might have thought it cool to post a profile photo of them pointing a handgun at the camera after having just taken a shooting lesson. When that same person was quite vocal about gun control on their social media feed, I might email to ask if they thought some viewers might not find the humor in their pose.

In such cases, the recipient of my emails could decide to keep the photos up. My goal wasn’t to police anyone’s activity on social media. They were just meant as a heads up in case they had forgotten they made the post.

When we post something on social media, we often post and forget about it. But what we post stays there, often for years and remains available for anyone who wants to find it.

I raise this issue now because over the past several months, I’ve had more queries from readers, former associates, family members or former students about how concerned they are about past posts somehow coming back to haunt them. There appears to be a warranted anxiety given some high-profile cases of graduate students in the United States on an international visa being targeted because of posts in their social media feeds or an op-ed they might have co-written for their campus newspaper. International students may be most vulnerable to repercussions. Nevertheless, the breadth of heightened anxiety seems wide.

The responsibility for what gets posted lies with the person who posted it. But if we come across something posted by someone we know that seems particularly incendiary, I believe the right thing is to alert that person.

When we see something, it’s not meddling to alert a friend. If someone reminds us what’s out there, the appropriate response is to thank them and to decide whether the post accomplishes what we intended or whether it’s time to take it down.

As long as we are not trying to harm someone, each of us should be free to post comments or to write pieces on issues about which we are passionate. But too many of us have been cavalier about what we post without being thoughtful or remembering that the Internet has a long memory.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

When emails are sent erroneously, should sender come clean?

If you send an email by mistake, should you admit your error?

Many of us have had the experience of sending an email or a text and inadvertently including someone we ought not to have included as a recipient. Perhaps a glib comment was made about a colleague or a boss who ends up receiving the message. Or a job application ends up in your manager’s inbox by mistake.

Few of us have likely sent an email threatening action against a person or an organization before we meant to send it. Nevertheless, such things happen.

When discovered, what should an errant emailer do?

Coming clean on the mistake and owning the error is the most honest response. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be repercussions.

If it’s an email about a colleague or a friend, some serious repair of the relationship might be in order. If it’s a particularly derogatory comment about a boss, the lift might be a bit heavier and, as a friend who is an expert in crisis management tells me, that email sender would be wise to start looking for a new job.

In politics, my crisis friend tells me, the tendency is often not to come clean, but to try to find ways to use a creative vocabulary to lessen the blow. That might include asking the recipient why they didn’t check with you to see if you were serious in the words you used. Or if the email included something that suggested you were so agitated you were likely to embark on a rule-breaking spree, to respond to queries with something as ambiguous as: “I try never to break the law.”

In 1923, humorist Will Rogers is reported to have said: “If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics.”

My crisis friend tells me that few in politics want to admit errors because they don’t want to end up relegated to political Siberia because it’s so cold, although he used more colorful language.

It might be viewed as naïve to believe that owning your mistakes and admitting to errors after you’ve made them is the right thing to do. Some errors get corrected before any harm can be done. There’s no reason to go around alerting people to every mistake you’ve ever made on the way to a successful outcome, particularly if those errors hurt no one and were not done with harmful intent. We all make mistakes.

But when you do discover an error or someone else does, I believe the right thing is to have the integrity to acknowledge the error. Granted, this might result in a blow to a career or a friendship, but lying to cover your actions – while a time-tested maneuver – shows little moral courage. On a practical level, it’s the lies we tell to cover up that often result in the most self-damage.

A year after he made the comment above, Will Rogers said: “They ought to pass a rule in this country in any investigations if a man can’t tell the truth the first time he shouldn’t be allowed to try again.”

That’s a law unlikely to be considered. What we can control, however, are our own actions and whether we choose to do the right thing when things go awry.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

How much should we read into emails we receive?

Is it disrespectful to dismiss someone else’s political views?

A reader we’re calling Edwin has more conservative political views than his older sister. They voted differently in the 2024 presidential election and they view the efforts of the current administration differently as well.

Nevertheless, they maintain a good relationship and are capable of exchanging opposite views without it resulting in an all-out battle. Edwin has long found it possible for each of them to be respectful of one another and their respective views while still holding true to their strong beliefs.

Recently, however, Edwin received an email from his sister that he found “very disappointing.”

In an email to his sister, Edwin had encouraged her to watch a Fox News interview with Elon Musk and members of his Department of Government Efficiency team. He mentioned to her that he found the group to be earnest in their stated objectives and hoped that his sister might give them the benefit of the doubt or at least not assume the worst about them.

His sister responded by telling Edwin she had seen the interview and ended her email with “Sick!” Given Edwin’s and his sister’s ages, it’s unlikely she was using “sick” as a slang some younger readers might use to connote something positive.

Edwin found that response to be dismissive of his efforts to help his sister see that reasonable people can disagree, but that everyone would do well to try to see what “makes the opposition tick.”

Did Edwin’s sister step over the line with her response to his email? Should he take her response as being dismissive of him and his efforts to enlighten her?

Clearly, if Edwin was taken aback by his sister’s response, he has every right to be, particularly if it wasn’t in keeping with the typical way they respond to one another.

But email can be a funny thing and intentions are not always as clear in email messages as they might be in a conversation in-person, by phone or via a video conference. What Edwin took as dismissive of him might have been more of a reaction to Elon Musk and the DOGE team or of the many efforts they have undertaken since being deployed to find ways to cut government spending.

For all Edwin knows, his sister may have found his attempt to portray Musk and team as earnest in their efforts as disrespectful of what he knew to be her views.

Again, Edwin has every right to be taken aback by his sister’s response. But particularly if Edwin wants to continue their relationship, which he indicates he does, the right thing would be for him to tell her he was taken aback by it and why. Doing so would give both the chance to flesh out how each of them responded to the interview they saw.

Very likely, they would not agree on the earnestness of the DOGE team or the value of its efforts, but they would have a chance to understand more of how one another ticks when it comes to such things. And that, after all, is something Edwin embraces as something we should all try to do.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.